Outdoor Hour Challenge:
This is our last mammal challenge of the month. For this challenge, you can start a life list of mammals using the running list notebook page in my freebie section. Print the page and insert it into your nature journal. Start recording every mammal you observe and keep the list going as long as possible. Printable Notebook Page My Mammal List: You can use this printable page instead of the running list notebook page if you wish to keep your mammal list by season. Reprint this page for every season and then compare your lists.
Getting Started Suggestion:
If you already own the Getting Started ebook, the challenge this week is the same as Outdoor Hour Challenge #5. This challenge in the ebook gives you some ideas for lists for your nature journal and a printable notebook page to use if you would like.
“The alert field naturalist learns to look for signs of mammals, even where there is little likelihood of seeing the animals themselves. He becomes an expert at interpreting tracks in mud, dust, or snow; at analyzing scats; at recognizing claw marks, gnaw marks, nests, houses, mounds, ridges, food piles, and other telltale indicators.” Complete Field Guide to American Wildlife by Henry Hill Collins
Outdoor Hour Challenge:
For this nature study challenge we will be looking for signs of mammals. You can look for mammal tracks, holes, scratches on tree trunks, scat, hollows in the trunk of a tree, burrow, holes in the lawn.Record your findings in your nature journal along with a drawing, the date, the weather, the time of day, and the type of animal if you have identified it at this time.
We always enjoy following tracks to see where they will lead…this is especially fun in the snow! Make a mental note to try this activity the next time you have snow in your area.
I am highly recommending this book from Amazon.com:Tracks, Scats and Signs.
I know many of you own it already and now would be the perfect time to pull it off the shelf. It is also contained in this book if you own this one instead: Fun With Nature: Take Along Guide.
Printable Notebook Page
Mammal Letter Notebook Page:After your Outdoor Hour time, write a letter to a friend or relative and tell them about your experiences. You can share anything you observed including any mammals or signs of mammals that you found. Include a sketch of your mammal, the tracks you saw, or tell a story about a mammal. If you saw some tracks, explain how you think the tracks got there. Was the animal looking for food? Finding a place to hide? You can make a copy of your letter and put it in your nature journal.
Getting Started Suggestion:
If you already own the Getting Started ebook, use the suggestions in Outdoor Hour Challenge #1 for your Outdoor Hour time. Although we are looking for signs of mammals this week, make sure to follow up any interest that comes from your time outdoors. You can use the notebook page provided in the ebook to record your experience or you can use the suggestion above to write a letter to a friend or relative about your experience. Above all, enjoy a few minutes outside in your own backyard or neighborhood.
Outdoor Hour Challenge:
The benefits of a year long tree study cannot be measured. Getting to know a tree season by season allows your family to take nature study to a new level by observing a tree in its complete annual cycle of growing. Use the links below to complete your tree study. Mark your calendar to remind you to complete a tree study in each season for the next year. After that, pick another tree and start all over again. Think of all the trees you will know by the time your children are grown up and on their own. This would be a wonderful gift to give your children.
You may also like to read this entry for additional simple ideas to get you started: For the Love of Trees
Four Seasons Tree Photo Project:
To accompany this challenge, print these notebook page for your nature journal and attach a photo of your tree in each season.
>Four Seasons Tree Photo Project Notebook Page: One page for each season’s observations and a photo or sketch.
Getting Started Suggestion:
You can complete Challenge #3 Now is the Time to Draw along with this Four Seasons Tree Study. Pick something from your tree to draw in your nature journal.
Our family loves this beautiful picture book that combines gorgeous paintings of a tree in all seasons along with questions to help you really see how a tree looks differently throughout the year. I highly recommend this book from my personal library.
Outdoor Hour Challenge:
Ready for a simple nature study challenge this week? Let’s use Challenge #2 Using Your Words to enjoy our outdoor time as we notice trees in our own backyard and neighborhood. Spend your fifteen minutes observing a tree up close and then follow up with some words. Your children can share their special words orally and then write them down if they wish.
Poetry and Nature Study Activity:
This week the challenge is to record your special words about trees in poem form for your nature journal.
Tree Poetry:Use this notebook page to record the words from your outdoor time. Choose one or more of the suggestions to get you started with your very own poem.
Getting Started Suggestion:
This week’s challenge comes directly from Challenge #2 Using Your Words. If you own the ebook, then you have a custom notebook page you can print to use in your nature notebook.
Outdoor Hour Challenge:
This week we will be using the Tree Study Grid from the October 2012 Newsletter. Print the grid out, cut it to include in your nature journal, and then take a few minutes during your week to complete some of the suggested activities. If you haven’t subscribed to the blog yet, you can do so now and you will receive the newsletter link in the next entry.
Printable Activity Notebook Page:
This week the challenge extra is a free printable activity notebook page.
My Tree Is A Living World: Record all the living things you find in the tree you observe. Remember to look high, low, on the bark, on the leaves, in the crown, and on the branches. If you don’t know what something is, record a description and then look it up after you return home.
Getting Started Suggestion:
If you already own this ebook, this week’s challenge would be a great addition to Challenge #6: Starting a Collection. Read the challenge for simple ideas to get you started with a nature collection. You could focus this month on collecting things related to trees.
Pictured above is our very casual collection of tree related items and misc natural objects. There are seeds, acorns, nuts, peeled tree bark, galls, leaves, moss, and a few small twigs. These sit right on top of our nature table.
Since this month’s theme is trees, I thought it might be fun to start a new photo challenge featuring trees.
Here is the challenge:
1. Take a photo of your child (or yourself) with a tree you observe during October 2012.
2. Join my new Pinterest board: Me and My Tree. You can email me with your Pinterest name and I will add you to the board.
3. Pin your photo to the group board. Make sure to leave the tree name in the description and your state and/or country. You do not have to show your child’s face if you don’t want to…be creative.
If you don’t have Queen Anne’s Lace to study, try the Getting Started suggestion in this post.
Outdoor Hour Challenge:
This week’s Outdoor Hour Challenge is from the Archives and the beginning of a potential year-long study of Queen Anne’s Lace. Please see the following Autumn Queen Anne’s Lace challenge for suggested activities to get your started. This is a study that you can repeat in every season for a complete year to see the life cycle of this interesting plant. Here are the past resources for Queen Anne’s Lace.
Please Note:
If you are interested in connecting your insect study and your study of Queen Anne’s Lace, do some careful observations of your plant for signs of insects. Follow up your outdoor time with some time spent identifying your insects.
“Children should be encouraged to make notes about the same plants or birds for several consecutive years. Each year will bring some new things to their notice and a fuller knowledge of the ways and habits of their subject.” The Charm of Nature Study, 1930
Printable Notebook Page:
This week the challenge extra is another notebook page. Make four copies and use one in each of the up-coming seasons to record your Queen Anne’s Lace observations. Seasonal Observations Queen Anne’s Lace – Use this notebook page in each of the four seasons to record you careful observations. Use the suggestions in the challenges listed above to guide your study.
Getting Started Suggestion:
You can complete Challenge #2 Using Your Words and the accompanying notebook page if you have the ebook. This would be especially helpful if you do not have any Queen Anne’s Lace to observe.
Outdoor Hour Challenge:
How about a Small Square Study this week? Use the directions from Challenge #9 to complete your own careful study of a square foot in your backyard or neighborhood. Look for signs of insects as you observe your square with a hand lens. Use the printable notebook page below to record your nature study or make a record in your nature journal using words and sketches.
Printable Activity Notebook Page:
This week the challenge extra is a free printable notebook page to go along with your square foot study.
Small Square Study – Living vs. Non-Living: As you complete your small square study, categorize the objects you find between living (or once living) and non-living. There is a place to list your items and sketch them too.
Getting Started Suggestion:
This week the challenge comes from the Getting Started ebook (Challenge #9). If you own the ebook, there are custom notebook pages to print to go along with this study.
A few weeks ago I asked for readers to comment and let me know what keeps them from starting nature study or what happens to make them stop once they get going.
Sally made a comment that resonated with many of you. She shared that she has a hard time focusing, was easily distracted by really good ideas, and felt that she needed to cover academic subjects first while she had the children’s attention. You can read all the comments here: Getting Started With the Outdoor Hour Challenge.
After some thought about Sally’s comment and her struggles, here are my best suggestions that come from both my experience and from those I have seen over the years who have successfully kept nature study a consistent part of their homeschool life.
Set aside fifteen minutes a week to get outside with your children. Have no other agenda other than to spend time outside concentrating on finding something of interest.
At first your own yard may seem boring, but I guarantee if you really focus on finding something, you will find it. If you feel you need a task to accomplish, pick one of the first three Outdoor Hour Challenges.
Don’t feel you have to spend big blocks of time outdoors…everyone can spare fifteen minutes.
#1 Let’s Get Started (Observations) – Make sure to do the reading in the Handbook of Nature Study before you go outside (Honestly, it is eight short pages with pictures so it won’t take you that long.) This challenge suggests that you let your children find two things they want to know more about…..it can be anything. Nothing says you have to know anything about those two objects but that is what you spend the next week talking about and looking up.You don’t need to follow-up with a nature journal entry…the power of just getting outside for a few minutes will become the motivating factor for wanting to do this more often. Concentrate on making nature study a consistent part of your week and opening your eyes to what you have in your own backyard. It takes a few weeks to establish this habit but it is worth the effort. You may like to read this entry: Finding the Ordinary to Be Extraordinary. Take nature study one day at a time and one object at a time.
#2 Using Your Words – If you are Charlotte Mason homeschooler, this challenge encourages nothing more than simple narration. You are still allowing your child to explore for just a few minutes with you outside and then to share that experience with words. It is a simple task but very powerful. Once you get on a roll and you are spending some time finding something interesting and adding in some discussion, then you are going to see that this is the foundation of every single other nature study session you can ever have. Don’t make it complicated.
#3 Now is The Time To Draw – This is where I think a lot of families start to have trouble. I highly recommend that you read the two pages suggested in the Handbook of Nature Study. Nature journals can take many forms and you can spend lots of time bogged down with making the decision between a journal or a binder, watercolors or markers. We have tried every which way in our family and it doesn’t matter in the end. What matters is that you offer the time and the supplies to record the experience and then over time your child will find a method that works for them. Just get started! Put away the fancy artsy nature journal books for now and just let your children record a simple sketch, the date, and a caption. There will be time in the future to add in some more decorative entries once you have established the habit. Plenty of time…..keep it simple for now. If all you ever did was to repeat those three challenges each month, you will have given your children a gift by allowing the time and motivation to be outside. It does not need to be complicated. You do not need fancy equipment, lots of nature journal supplies, a library of field guides, or a background in biology.
What Do Your Children Really Need From You?
Your children need you to encourage them to be outside on a consistent basis, learning to explore and to observe closely what they have in their own world. They need to see your enthusiasm. They will need your help to learn more about things that interest them by taking them to the library to check out books or to find the answers from the Handbook of Nature Study or on the internet and then share with them the next time you are outside. They need you to regularly allow time to just be outside during all the seasons….we can all bear fifteen minutes a week even under even the most uncomfortable circumstances.
Read pages 2 and 3 and then realize that many families need to stick to the Observation column for a very long time. The Reasoning section will happen as you gain confidence and your children begin to make connections. The more time you spend in observations, the more you will have to build on as your children grow and mature.
This download will also help you if you have multiple ages in your family. The younger ones will stick to the Observation column and more mature students will move on to the Reasoning and then eventually Expression columns. There is no hurry.
Hopefully there is something here in this post that will help get you going if you have become stuck. I promise to keep the new Friday challenges simple and to give you the guidance you need to give the Outdoor Hour Challenge a try and to keep at it through the next year. We can all encourage each other with comments and examples.
If you ever get frustrated and need me to give you a pep talk, please let me know.
I have a few more entries in response to the comments left in the blog entry from two weeks ago.
New Idea for 2012: First Day of Summer Photo Walk – take a camera outdoors and find some special First Day of Summer subjects, take a photo, print a few out, safely tuck them into your nature journal. You can combine this with the Summer Photo Challenge if you want and post your photo on the Pinterest board.
by Henry Hill Collins
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